Re: New approach to activities/intents

Dimitri Glazkov wrote:
> Domenic's question still needs addressing separately, but just a quick 
> response here -- the API roc described there is different. Tubes are 
> just like talking to a worker or any MessagePort. There is no extra 
> API surface emerging from getContext-like function call.

Any getContext or postMessage protocol is inherently not 
object-detectable, at least not at the string-keyed level.

In principal, as bz said, the tension between extensions and standards 
motivates supporting extensions, and I share your desire to support 
experimentation so long as it is consensus-oriented. We want to avoid 
overlarge jumps by one proprietor, who both risks failing to bring along 
competitors step by step, and seeming to abuse any market power it may 
possess.

So we want to support extension, extensibility, in ways that don't lead 
to bad game-theoretic and real-world outcomes, e.g. ActiveX PKI in 
Korea. There's no silver bullet or algorithm to do this, but API style 
matters (object detection vs. non-detection; gentle-peoples' agreements 
about how proprietary/particular an API to try).

The JS SIMD work definitely experiences this tension. Do we want a union 
of all (SSE, NEON, AVX2) vector instructions? Intersection may be too 
small, and emulation may be too slow to be worth using. The 
http://github.com/johnmccutchan/ecmascript_simd issues cover this well, 
and show good particularized thinking.

To particularize without object detection is hard.

In any event, IMHO native stacks are not killing the Web, nor are native 
stacks evolving willy-nilly on random and arbitrarily rapid schedules or 
via message-based API settings. Apple and Android are at most annual 
big-release OSes, e.g. I welcome counterexamples.

Sorry to be skeptical. Object detection, extensible-web-manifesto 
low-level APIs, avoiding indefinitely scoped or "lifetime" proprietary 
extension mechanisms in favor of incrementalism, all seem better to me.

/be

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2014 04:15:03 UTC